CLOSED DAWES
The Journalist Behind The Downfall of a British Drug Kingpin
Robert Dawes, the ‘El Chapo of Europe’, has been condemned to die in a Dutch prison.
The Nottingham crime boss was handed a whole life sentence on 10 January for the murder of Gerard Meesters, a schoolteacher from Groningen.
Dawes sent a British hitman to the Netherlands in 2002 to kill a woman he suspected of stealing drugs. Instead, the killer gunned down her brother, Gerard, an innocent in ‘the game’.
Daniel Sowerby, the hitman, was eventually convicted of the murder and jailed for life in Holland. He refused to name the man who ordered the hit fearing reprisals on his family back in the UK.
That man was Robert Dawes; and how Sowerby gave him up is down to Carl Fellstrom, a freelance journalist specialising in East Midlands organised crime.
To understand the risk-reward ratio of real journalism over the grandstanding of mainstream reporters riding shotgun with the cops, hats off and eyes down.
